welcome to the forum.

didn't give us any info. at least part B...

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/45453.page

or

give us a sample video, clip is 4K from a phantom 3 drone, so that experienced PD users can try to duplicate your problems...

attach a reasonable sized source video...

yup, you've seen it 'Attachments'



PepsiMan

'garbage in garbage out' 'no bridge too far'

Yashica Electro 8 LD-6 Super 8mm
Asrock TaiChi X470, AMD R7 2700X, W7P 64, MSI GTX1060 6GB, Corsair 16GB/RAM
Dell XPS L702X i7-2860QM, W7P / W10P 64, Intel HD3000/nVidia GT 550M 1GB, Micron 16GB/RAM
Samsung Galaxy Note3/NX1

My apologies, I had not read that post. I include three attachments:

1- PD version & build screen shot

2- DxDiag.txt

3- video excerpt. This is the 4K output I get. Note the ground in front of the cottage, and the roof; then the tree line on the other side of the river for the 'pixelation'. I wish to understand what causes that pixelation and the remedial action I should take.

For a 4K video and a frame rate of 30 the bit rate of 20 Mb is much too low.
The pixelation is typically of a too low bit rate.

I have a 4K camcorder, it uses 60Mb, that is the minimum for an image that does not have too much motion. Also use variable bit rate if you have it.

What is the bit rate etc of the original video? As a rule, do not change the original format to get best possible PQ.

Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

thanks, Eugene.



my Galaxy Note 3's 4K bitrate is 48.5 Mb/sec so my custom profile,

i've set at 49.0 Mb/sec to keep the best Picture Quality or Video Quality possible.

so is the audio. i set to equal the bitrate; therefor, there wouldn't be any stretching

or compressing...



by the way, it's a nice aerial shot!

happy editing.

PepsiMan

'garbage in garbage out' 'no bridge too far'

Yashica Electro 8 LD-6 Super 8mm
Asrock TaiChi X470, AMD R7 2700X, W7P 64, MSI GTX1060 6GB, Corsair 16GB/RAM
Dell XPS L702X i7-2860QM, W7P / W10P 64, Intel HD3000/nVidia GT 550M 1GB, Micron 16GB/RAM
Samsung Galaxy Note3/NX1

The low bit rate may have been introduced when you trimmed and produced the sample clip. We'd need to see a short original clip to see what the actual bit rate is.

It doesn't have to be a beauty shot, just a few seconds of actual footage will be enough for us to see. You weren't using "trimmed" clips in PD by any chance, were you? You'll be disappointed with the quality unless you edit the original clips directly.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

PesiMan.

Yes, that copter shoot looks pretty cool.

I actually do not follow my own rules by using 50Mb, the default PD14 rather than the cameras 60Mb.

A month ago I was shooting the take off in Juneau harbor of a small plane. The entire water surface had very fine ripples on it as I followed the plane with the camcorder.

Later looking at the scene on a 4K PC monitor I could not believe my eyes, the shot was unusable, full of "mosquito noise".

After several thousand 4K shots this was the first time that happened, most likely caused by the rippled water. Just too much picture detail and not enough band width to carry it. Very much like the copter shot.

The camera allows 100Mb, a number of members on the AX100 forum too feel that 100 is overkill, so the final output for me is 50Mb VBR.



Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Hi FFoulem -

I agree with the other contributors to this thread, on the whole.

Without having seen the original clips from your camera, my view is that it's not just the bitrate. I've rendered some 4K clips from my Sony Action Cam to similar bitrates (16-24Mbps) - even though they were recorded at 60 or 100Mbps - and they look perfectly acceptable.

BTW - I wouldn't do that for high action shots, like my daughter's cheer leading squad! I'm talking about "walk in the garden" type shots.

BUT - you've rendered to WMV. That's a huge factor with picture quality.

Some time back, I downloaded quite a few 4K sample videos - some original (off the camera) & others edited & produced. I just checked through some the edited ones and the VBR on some is <10Mbps - but they look superb! They're mainly steady shots of landscapes etc and they're NOT rendered as WMV!

Cheers - Tony
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Quote: A month ago I was shooting the take off in Juneau harbor of a small plane. The entire water surface had very fine ripples on it as I followed the plane with the camcorder.

Later looking at the scene on a 4K PC monitor I could not believe my eyes, the shot was unusable, full of "mosquito noise".

After several thousand 4K shots this was the first time that happened, most likely caused by the rippled water. Just too much picture detail and not enough band width to carry it. Very much like the copter shot.

The camera allows 100Mb, a number of members on the AX100 forum too feel that 100 is overkill, so the final output for me is 50Mb VBR.

Very good point. Several tests I've seen of H.264 and H.265 is the picture quality(PQ) signal to noise ratio improvements typically becomes rather insignificant after about the 30-50Mbps range for the majority of common video scenes. However, for sequences with detailed textures like water ripples, flowing water, blowing grass, camera panning trees or blowing leaves on trees, data I've seen indicate significant PQ improvements out to 120+Mbps.

There are also several Variance Adaptive Quantization settings within encoders to help provide that picture detail at lower bitrates, unfortunately PD does not expose much encoder feature customization options even though ever encoder has a whole suite of specialized functions. So the best one can do with PD is tackle it with high bitrate, source and output.

Jeff

Quote: PesiMan.

Yes, that copter shoot looks pretty cool.

I actually do not follow my own rules by using 50Mb, the default PD14 rather than the cameras 60Mb.

A month ago I was shooting the take off in Juneau harbor of a small plane. The entire water surface had very fine ripples on it as I followed the plane with the camcorder.

Later looking at the scene on a 4K PC monitor I could not believe my eyes, the shot was unusable, full of "mosquito noise".

After several thousand 4K shots this was the first time that happened, most likely caused by the rippled water. Just too much picture detail and not enough band width to carry it. Very much like the copter shot.

The camera allows 100Mb, a number of members on the AX100 forum too feel that 100 is overkill, so the final output for me is 50Mb VBR.



Eugene

As a fellow AX100 owner myself I say the 100Mbs mode is there precisely to help with these issues such as rippling water, river rapids, a dense forest with winds blowing through the leaves of the treetops and of course fast moving objects in general. Otherwise 60Mbs is fine if the camera remains mainly static and most of what it's filming does too.

I almost always film at it's 100Mbs rate for the same reason I film in 4K.... having the highest quality source material usually results in output material at it's highest quality....especially for down-converts to 1080 or 720 or lower bitrates. I only shoot in the 1080P 50Mbs XAVC S mode of this camera when I need the 60fps for very fast object filming.

I just upgraded from PD Ultra 13 to Ultra 14 tonight and I'm very disappointed that Cyberlink still kept the maximum output bitrate of renders at 60Mbs. It was the main reason and hope (assumption) when I upgraded that it would support a higher output bitrate. 60Mbs will be okay in most cases, but if the video really needs to remain at 100Mbs in order to not be a fairly blocky mess.... I'll have to resort to my Vegas Pro 13's 4K 100Mbs XAVC S output profile for those renders. Otherwise the render times in Vegas are the longest I've heard of. About 3x longer in general than PowerDirector takes! Sony FDR-AX100 4K UHD camcorder
Sony ECM-XYST1M Stereo Microphone
Sony VCT-VPR1 Compact Remote Control Tripod
Vello VB-1000 ActionPan Stabilizing Action Grip
PowerDirector 14
Intel i7-4510u w/8GB RAM Nvidia GTX 850M w/4GB

I'd like to post a retraction. I wrote about lower bitrates being fine for "walk in the garden shots". After posting, I took the Sony AC for a walk in the garden, deliberately moving quickly past leaves at close range & panning across leafy textured areas.

Recorded at both 100 & 60 Mbps, the former is the better. Rendering to lower bitrates (as I was suggesting earlier) was hopeless for these shots. The leaves went blurry & a fair bit of unwanted "noise" was generated.

Using SVRT & rendering to that profile gave me the best results.

GS kid - in the Produce module - select you preferred format & profile. If you click the + button, you can set the VBR to 100Mbps to match your original clips. Screen shot attached.

Cheers - Tony
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Well ynotfish....



I did some tests. I have a 10-second 4K 30p clip from my AX100 at the 100mbs setting. Using windows properties (and me rounding the numbers) it said the clip had a Data Rate of 96.5Mbs and a Total Bitrate of 98.1Mbs. When I used the intelligent SVRT button the output file render had a Data Rate of 90.1Mbs and a Total Bitrate of 90.3Mbs. Then I used the intelligent SVRT button a second time, but customized it manually to a 100Mbs seting just like you showed me and the output file had a Data Rate of 94.9Mbs and a Total Bit rate of 95.0Mbs.

Also... the original clip's audio had a bit rate of 1537Kbs with a 48kHz sample rate. Both of the test output files had a bit rate of 127Kbs and a 24kHz sample rate.

So I guess I can render output clips higher than 60Mbs after all. And to think I never had to upgrade to 14 at all to acomplish this in the first place. Sony FDR-AX100 4K UHD camcorder
Sony ECM-XYST1M Stereo Microphone
Sony VCT-VPR1 Compact Remote Control Tripod
Vello VB-1000 ActionPan Stabilizing Action Grip
PowerDirector 14
Intel i7-4510u w/8GB RAM Nvidia GTX 850M w/4GB

Gs Kid
I think the biggest asset in my setup of PD14, is its ability to fully make use of the GTX960 abilities.

Still amazing to see it encode HEVC 4K in an hour what used to take days.

There is free software called MEDIAINFO it will give you data of a video file, better than WP

Tony, that would be similar to my "harbor shot". As mentioned I was rather shocked as to how bad it was, primarely because that had never happened before.

I will start using custom settings too from now on to maintain the 60Mb that the camera puts out rather than go down to 50.




Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

I had submitted an extensive post yesterday, to realize it never got posted.

So here is an abridged version: you guys got me exploring things I would not have considered otherwise.

My DJI Phantom P3 records at a (maximum) of 60mbps. The problematic clip came from a collection of 5 clips I recorded on that shoot. I checked frame rate ane bitrate on each: frame rate was 23 f/sec; bit rate varied between 57 and 59mbps.

ynotfish's comment about something else that the bitrate was good insight: that one clip was 7min, but only the first 1min15 seconds was recorded properly. When playing beyond that time, all I see if the frame of 1min15. Something corrupted that recording, and I could not salvage the balance. The shot I submitted is from the usable 1min15.

I did some tests, removing that one clip, and the rest rendered beautifully (especially when I match the original file format, e.g 4K Mp4).

Moral to my story: even if one portion of a questionable clip doesn't look corrupted, assume it is.

My faith in PD is restored :

Complementary question: There are times I will want to render at a different resolution than recorded. Any tips so the quality doesn't suffer?



Cheers, and thanks!

Quote: ...My faith in PD is restored :
Complementary question: There are times I will want to render at a different resolution than recorded. Any tips so the quality doesn't suffer?
Cheers, and thanks!

Glad to hear that you've worked out the difficulties!

I general, and as you saw, chosing the highest bit rate for a given resolution will give you the best results, regardless of the resolution you produce to.

Many people find that using CPU encoding vs. hardware/GPU will give a smoother, potentially less blocky appearance at the possible expense of longer producing times. You may want to experiment with sections of individual projects to get a feel for the pros and cons of each approach as they relate to your clips and goals.

Also, the newer HEVC/H.265 codec can give better performance than AVC/H.264, but it's not universal yet and not every player or streaming website is capable of working with those clips. You'd defintiely want to know before you start if H.265 is an option or not.

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°

Quote: Gs Kid
I think the biggest asset in my setup of PD14, is its ability to fully make use of the GTX960 abilities.

Still amazing to see it encode HEVC 4K in an hour what used to take days.

There is free software called MEDIAINFO it will give you data of a video file, better than WP

I did download and install MEDIAINFO. I like it although it's only off from what WP reports by only a few tenths of a megabit, so WP is perfectly okay to use. What I found strange about it was that MEDIAINFO showed the Data Rate and the Total Bitrate as having different values on the original XAVC clip.... just as WP reported them having different values. But.... for the two rendered MP4 clips from the test, MEDIAINFO shows the Data Rate and Total Bit Rate as having the EXACT SAME vaules....while WP shows a slight difference between their values.

A question for everybody....

As I stated before.....the original clip's audio had a bit rate of
1537Kbs with a 48kHz sample rate. Both of the test output files had a
bit rate of 127Kbs and a 24kHz sample rate. That's a rather large drop in quality...especially the bitrate. The original XAVC clip's audio is PCM. The two test render clips are encoded in AAC (LC).

The question is..... how do I increase the sound quality of the output clips to better match the original clip's sound quality?.... Considering the significant drop in bitrate in the rendered clips! Sony FDR-AX100 4K UHD camcorder
Sony ECM-XYST1M Stereo Microphone
Sony VCT-VPR1 Compact Remote Control Tripod
Vello VB-1000 ActionPan Stabilizing Action Grip
PowerDirector 14
Intel i7-4510u w/8GB RAM Nvidia GTX 850M w/4GB

Hi GS kid -

Because customising MPEG-4 audio in the GUI is limited, I tried modifying the Profile.ini to get an audio bitrate of 1536Kbps. That didn't work. Rendering sat on 1% for ages then I gave up.

H.264 MP4 is restricted to AAC audio.

You can render to H.264 M2TS or MKV 4K @ 60Mbps (or more) and select LPCM audio @ 1536Kbps 48kHz (by clicking that + button) - file sizes are slightly higher, of course.

Cheers - Tony
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To ynotfish...



Ok...LPCM was a nightmare. My windows media player wouldn't play the sound at all...just the video. Tried H265 and WMP played the audio fine, but the video lagged behind the audio big time. YouTube doesn't support my camera's native XAVC S that I know of (which will be the target for my clips on my YouTube channel). So I compromised a bit on the audio quality and decided on a custom profile that consists of H264 with a MP4 container, 100Mbs video and AAC audio at 384Kbs and 48kHz. It runs just fine in WMP. Sony FDR-AX100 4K UHD camcorder
Sony ECM-XYST1M Stereo Microphone
Sony VCT-VPR1 Compact Remote Control Tripod
Vello VB-1000 ActionPan Stabilizing Action Grip
PowerDirector 14
Intel i7-4510u w/8GB RAM Nvidia GTX 850M w/4GB

GS KID

There are better players, free, than the one you use.

Most on this forum consider the Media player classic 64 to be the best followed by Daumplayer and Gom Player.

They can make use of HA if you have the proper GPU card. All three will play 4K HEVC, at least on this computer. CPU usage during 4K HEVC pb is usually less than 10% on some players as low as 3%.

Measuring bit rate, 5% accuracy is about it, Mediainfo has been around for some time and had numerous updates so I think they have found their bugs by now.

As an aside, I ordered faster SD cards for the AX100 so that from now on I will do 100Mb. That desaster in Juno Harbor is still fresh on my mind. The interesting point is that I have done that exact same shot, shooting a plane take off from water, many times in HD and SD over the years. Never seen such dramatic deteriation of the video. But then the AX100 is doing 4K, 4 times the resolution of HD, at only about 2 times the bit rate of HD.







Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

VLC from Videolan.org is another great, free option

YouTube/optodata

DS365 | Win11 Pro | Ryzen 9 3950X | RTX 4070 Ti | 32GB RAM | 10TB SSDs | 5K+4K HDR monitors

Canon Vixia GX10 (4K 60p) | HF G30 (HD 60p) | Yi Action+ 4K | 360Fly 4K 360°